Tag: a s byatt
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2019 in reading
I had set a goal for 2019 of reading 100 books and nearly made it with 95 books. I’ll aim again this year. My favorite reads for the year, in alphabetical order, were: Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath The Best American Essays 2019 edited by Rebecca Solnit and Robert Atwan…
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A year of reading
So in 2013, I ended up reading a total of 114 books. Some interesting statistics along the way: 27.2% were written by women. Asians and Latinos each made up 2.6%. Blacks were 1.8%. I find these numbers to be rather disgraceful. 40.4% were for my MFA. Two were in Spanish. Eleven were translated (from French,…
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Beautiful sentences
All English stories get bogged down in whether or not the furniture is socially and aesthetically acceptable. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
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Beautiful sentences
My imagination failed. I got all enmeshed in what was realism and what was reality and what was true—my need not be int that place—and my imagination failed. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
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Beautiful sentences
Time passes differently in the solitude of hotel rooms. The mind expands, but lazily, and the body contracts in its bright box of space. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
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Beautiful sentences
At a nightclub in Istanbul once, Gillian had been shocked, without quite knowing why, to find one of those vacant, sweetly pink and blue church Virgins, life-sie, standing as part of the decorations, part hat-stand, part dumb-waitress, as you might find a many-handed Hindu deity or plaster Venus in an equivalent occidental club. Now suddenly,…
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Beautiful sentences
She was Hamlet and his father and Shakespeare: she saw Milton’s snake and the miraculous flying horse of the Thief of Baghdad, but Saint Paul’s angels rested under suspicion of being made-up because she had been told they were special because true. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
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Beautiful sentences
A woman’s life runs from wedding to childbirth to nothing in a twinkling of an eye. A. S. Byatt,The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
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Beautiful sentences
Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan…